Where Time Winds Blow, page 28
“Well, if it isn’t the olgoi hunter! Hello, Faulcon.”
The voice caught Faulcon by surprise; he twisted round, looking back across his shoulder. Ben Leuwentok stood there, smiling from behind his thin mask; he carried a shoulder bag and camera, and was dressed in white and green safari clothes. He walked up to Faulcon and they shook hands.
“I was coming looking for you, Ben.”
“I heard you’d been ignored by a time wind. You’re a lucky man.”
For a moment they exchanged a long, searching gaze. He knows, Faulcon thought. He had probably known all along. “I wasn’t ignored,” he said quietly. “They took me and they brought me back. In the wink of an eye, so I’m told. In the wink of an eye.”
Leuwentok shrugged off his shoulder bag and put it on the ground. He closed up the camera, taking time about it, concentrating on the actions, although his mind was clearly elsewhere. “I was following the olgoi,” he said. “Merlin’s bright, now. The migration is beginning in a big way.” He looked up at Faulcon. “How long did they keep you? Hours? Days?”
“I don’t know. It seemed like no time at all, and yet I recall an age of floating in their minds. I was disembodied, and yet I could feel everything. I touched their hearts, their souls, their memories. I came closer, I think, than anyone has ever come. We exchanged thoughts, and I suspect it was for the first time, although they must have come close with Kris Dojaan.”
Leuwentok looked up sharply. “That’s a familiar name … Mark’s brother?”
“That’s right.”
“I remember Mark. A vicious man, totally unprincipled.”
“That’s true,” said Faulcon, “but it’s not important. Mark was taken by the winds, but there was something that existed between his brother Kris and himself, an empathy that kept them in touch …”
Leuwentok was familiar with such rare, but undeniable, linkages. “Personality fifteen,” he said, “ego links, instantaneous awareness of each other.”
“That sort of thing. Kris knew his brother was here, and alive, and his dedication to the task of finding Mark was almost tangible. The creatures of this world responded to him almost at once—they tricked him with an amulet that was one of his brother’s artistic creations; they convinced him to come into the wind because they made it seem as if his brother was waiting for him. And when they made contact with Kris, they made contact with me, and with Lena Tanoway. We should have been honoured—we were a special study to them.”
Again Leuwentok fiddled with his camera before glancing at Faulcon. “Why are they doing it? And why did they let you go? And why have you picked me to tell this to? Why? Am I next?” His face was white behind his mask, his eyes wide, his demeanour that of a man suddenly afraid.
Faulcon laughed. “Get on the byke. There’s something I want to show you.”
Leuwentok obeyed, squeezing onto the saddle behind Faulcon’s thin form. “Why you, Ben? Why not? You were very close to understanding the immense life-form that dominates Kamelios …” He punched the byke into action, shouting above the roar of the engine. “In fact, I suspect you knew all along. You certainly knew more than you let on last time I saw you.”
“I have ideas, that’s all.”
“That’s as may be.” Faulcon guided the byke in a tight circle, cutting between shadowy trunks of skagbark. Leuwentok clung on too tightly for comfort. “There’s another reason, though. I want you to come up to Hunderag Country with me. I want you to see what I see, and then you’ll know everything. I might have to wait there a while, and it will be up to you to report to the Magistar Colona and the others.”
As the byke lurched along the track, back towards the valley, Leuwentok shouted, “I don’t mind that. I don’t mind at all.”
They came close to the gentle slopes of the valley; here, where the valley was nearly at its end, the span of the gorge was wider, but the drop was shallow. A few dusty, rather disappointing derelicts were scattered about the slopes and flatlands below: buildings, mostly, and unimpressive. The winds usually blew themselves out some way before this “beach”, as the whole area was known.
As they stood, looking out across the rift, Faulcon said, “There.”
“I’ve seen it before. Ruins.” He looked at Faulcon.
“Not ruins,” said Faulcon quickly, and tapped a finger against his temple. “Thoughts. Images. Dreams. Pictures from the mind of a creature that is several creatures in one, and which flows through this valley from one end to the other, almost a reflection of its own breath of life. It doesn’t respond to the moons, or the daylight; it responds only to its own whim, rolling between the cliffs, seeking out the tiny life-forms that it has been watching for years—seconds by its own standards—and which it is still watching now.”
Leuwentok was silent behind his mask for a while. He shook his head slowly, then, and Faulcon imagined that he was putting together pieces that had never quite fitted before. “I’d wondered about that. I thought the wind itself might be some by-product of the passage of the creatures: I always thought there were several creatures, I always thought of them. And I thought they moved through time, dragging these artifacts with them, and creating dream images. But I suppose they don’t move in time at all.”
“They aren’t as tightly constrained by time, by the present moment as we are. But there is no span of billions of years. A moment to them is perhaps a few of our months, and they are free within that span of time. All of this, this whole valley, is a sort of crease in their ego; the ruins are the memories of other creatures that visited this world, and perhaps even lived here. There are even a few human ruins if you watch closely, a few human memories, twisted and changed just enough to make us blind to their real nature. Intelligent life has visited Kamelios for thousands of years, being taken in the same way as we have been taken. The creatures down there looked for memories, for life; they watched structures being built, and later they recreated them, made them into solid forms and beached them on the shores of their own collective mind.”
“Tolpari,” said Leuwentok. “Thought into substance. It never occurred to me. I was convinced that most of the strange manifestations were from an alien mind. But I linked the ruins with time, and accepted them as real.”
“We all did. Very solid images, very real. They seemed something apart from the pyramid, and God, and the phantom.”
“Tolpari are real. They’re a phenomenon that some say we experienced on Earth more than we realized: space craft, figures, animals, all created by concentrated thought and given substance, and even life—how is something I couldn’t tell you. They always decayed, though. The artifacts in Steel City haven’t.”
“Same principle, different intensity,” said Faulcon, and thought of the very solid phantom, the one that showed up on photographs: turned on and off by the group mind that created it.
Leuwentok put his hands to his head and stood, for a minute or so, staring into the distance. Then he said, “But why are they doing all this, Faulcon? Why the tricks? Why these images? Are they trying to communicate in some way, throwing up echoes of our own minds?”
Faulcon relived that moment of close consciousness, floating so still, and feeling the contact of awareness, becoming for a while a part of the wind, seeing in an instant the longings and the memories of the natural inhabitants of VanderZande’s World; he felt dizziness, a slight nausea; he felt his body teeter on the edge of the cliff, and stepped back, at the same time shaking his head to clear the sudden sensory assault that threatened to upset his equilibrium.
He said, “In one sense, yes. They are trying to communicate. Only their definition of communication isn’t the same as ours. To them communication is part of reproduction, and it comes out simply as: ‘Carry my life, my existence, my awareness, carry all of this, some mental part of me to another me on another world.’ And part of that communication involved finding out the answer to a simple question: what will make a man die? What one thing would make us all sacrifice our lives to the wind when we happened across this creature’s mate, a thousand light years away, a thousand years in the future. Was jealousy the key? Or passion? Intrigue? Curiosity? How they got us with curiosity! They gave us buildings, apparitions, life-forms—never an intelligent one, and how tantalizing that was—pyramids, they gave us anything and everything to whet our appetites for the unknown. They addled our brains to see what remained constant, what drive existed so deep rooted that they could find the “lemming-factor”, the all-jump-together button. They seemed to tune into the most psychically aware of us. Those without that particular openness of mind are probably dead. These creatures just didn’t understand us, because they were responding almost instinctively, getting us ready to aid their reproduction. We’re olgoi, Ben; messengers … To the wind-creatures we are star-travelling olgoi, to be primed with the seed of their lives and dispatched to other worlds, other winds, there to give up that seed—and our lives—in a splendid moment of ‘mating’; mating not for the reproduction of the physical form of the creatures, but for communication … the spirit of life communicated to another of their kind, a replenishment, a linkage of existence. All of these last few years they have been working out what to prompt us to do, how to programme us to behave in a common way whenever we encounter their kind on other worlds. They sent phantoms, and they entered our heads with a different sort of phantom. They had us running about like headless chickens, pecking at enigma, seeking lost times.”
Faulcon was breathless; he dropped to a crouch and dug out a small piece of stone from the earth, tossing it idly over the cliff and watching it roll away down the slopes. Leuwentok had wrapped his arms about his body, stood silent, intense. Faulcon thought he might have been afraid to speak, in case it should stop him fully understanding what Faulcon was saying, communicating what he had learned during his wild ride.
“Whatever Mark’s brother, Kris, saw in the valley—he saw a phantom—and whoever it was, it made him more determined to go into the time winds because it reinforced his belief in the possibility of survival beyond them. The same happened to me. My own fear had to be overcome by reason, and at the last minute, as I was about to be caught by the trick, as I finally convinced myself that I could travel in time, I saw through it! The creature responded to that particular panic because it was like an enormous blast of mental energy—it was a communication as we understand it, and which they finally came to understand themselves. Quite suddenly they could see that we were not biological machines, that we no longer had some common, animalistic drive that was there for them to programme. An immense, intangible creature, trying to communicate with us: carry my life, my existence, carry the spirit of my life to others of my kind on other worlds. Only we couldn’t do it; we’re too diverse, too different from one another. The deep drives are just ghosts, now; phantoms. We’ve become a superficial race, aware of transient, passing things, fixed to a moment of time, busy evaluating our individual worlds. The deep world, the link between man and earth, has been destroyed by inutility. There was nothing for the creatures to grasp, to key into; nothing but scattered dreams, desires, images, different things to different men. They failed and failed. They trapped a few rifters, and killed many through misunderstanding. They found no key to the trapping of us all, and therefore no way to programme us to commit suicide, or at least ‘union’ on another world. Those failures that survived, those who were lost, they moved in their own way to a sleeping place, a long way from us, preserved because it didn’t know what else to do with them.”’
“You know that for a fact?” Leuwentok’s voice was unsteady.
“I know it.”
“You’ve seen them? Where have you seen them?”
“In dreams, Ben. As yet only in dreams. But I want you to come up into Hunderag Country with me.”
“I’ll do that, Faulcon. You know me. I’ve worked for years to try and come to some sort of ecological understanding of Kamelios. I thought I’d got it. I understand the moons, the fauna, I thought I understood that mankind was responding to alien dreams, that our unfulfilled dreams and those of some creature, some entity, were interlinked, causing the chaos of Steel City and all its departments and failing scientific studies. I thought we were shallow creatures trapped by the deep drives, the ancient parts of our existences, the left-overs. Now you tell me that there are no deep parts. We are superficial creatures trapped by that superficiality: I want to know, I want to have, I want to touch, to experience … always I want. And I want to know. Is knowing such a superficial thing? Is knowledge so empty?”
Faulcon turned away from the valley, stretching his cramped limbs and leading the way back to the byke. As he walked he said, “I can’t answer that, Ben. The manchanged made me realize something when I was with them last. They said that natural knowing is the only knowing.” He glanced at Leuwentok, who walked hunched and frowning beside him. “What you are born with, what you die with, that which is the very life you are. Natural knowing. All else, all we learn, all we strive for, all of that is garbage. Our species has lived for so long trying to find some reason to learn that we’ve now lost that ability to know without effort, to know naturally. Our friends in the valley, the creatures that are the wind, have never experienced anything like us, such empty things, such transient life-forms.”
Leuwentok made a sound, perhaps a bitter laugh. “There’s truth in that, and there’s nonsense. Without science, without striving, we wouldn’t be here, across the Galaxy from Earth, on an alien world; without disease.”
“Or we would have been here a long time ago; without disease. We are an impatient, edgy species, Ben. We can’t wait for things to happen; we have to make them happen. We’ve put our lives into trying; trying has become a religion to us, something honourable, and we’ve overlooked the fact that trying is failing. Ultimately our success, our understanding of our microcosm, comes generations late, and when it comes it is a truly superficial thing.”
The byke had fallen over; together they heaved it upright, and brushed dirt from its panels. Leuwentok said, “I don’t really believe that. How can I? I’m a ‘modern’ man. The Age of Roses is long since past for me.” He shrugged his equipment pack onto his shoulders again, then hesitated and grinned, the mask wrinkling slightly. “A few minutes ago when you asked me to come with you, I was afraid. I felt horribly afraid.” Faulcon said nothing, just watched the biologist. “So you see, Faulcon, I do believe what you said. Quite apparently I do, quite obviously. But I’ll only admit it to you. I’m certainly not going to admit it to myself. How can I? I’m a modern man.”
Faulcon tapped his temple twice, then laughed. “Get on the byke. First stop Overlook; then the Jaraquaths and the sort of food you’ve had nightmares about.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Allissia was working in the lower fields, digging furrows in the stony earth ready to take a new season’s calcas. She saw them as they rode above the distant edge of the plateau, and for a moment manchanged and rifters regarded each other across the distance of half a mile or more. It was late in the day and the wind was strong, blowing hair and dust and sweet pollen from the high forests. Shading her eyes, Allissia finally decided that one of the pair was Leo Faulcon. She jumped up and down three or four times, then stopped, then jumped some more. She waved. Then she stared hard into the distance, puzzled as to why the figures on their weird-shaped machines had stopped so still.
Across the intervening land came the sudden, repeated roar of the bykes; one of the men waved and Allissia cried out delightedly, dropped tool and earth sack and turned to run and fetch her husband.
Audwyn was in the high field. Allissia ran through the village, stopping just for a moment in her own house to make sure that she had all the food she would need for the guests, and then she took off like an olgoi, bounding and tripping, through the skagbark woods, and out into the busy field where harvesting was in progress.
Audwyn was close by. He stopped his work as Allissia shouted to him. Several of the manchanged gathered about her, their bodies reeking with the smell of sweat and dirt, their faces creased and content, but tired, very tired after this exertion. Audwyn wiped the earth from his blade, and kissed the cold steel. He laid the tool at the edge of the field, pointing inwards, the promise that the time he was absent from the harvest would be made up two-fold the next day. But there was none who resented his departure.
Audwyn loped ahead of the sprinting form of Allissia, and they reached the house in a panting race. Faulcon and Ben Leuwentok were waiting for them at the edge of the village, and the manchanged caught their breath and went to meet them.
“I’ve come to ask your help,” said Faulcon, his voice tired as it sounded through his dusty, choked mask. Allissia took his arm, led him back to the house with Audwyn walking beside Leuwentok and hearing of the journey up to the plateau. Leuwentok seemed quite relaxed with the manchanged.
“Don’t even talk,” Allissia insisted, “until you’ve both eaten and we’ve drunk a toast to our pleasure at seeing you.”
They seated themselves around the wide, wood table. The sight of food made Faulcon’s mouth water, simple vegetables and boiled meat though it was. Leuwentok seemed slightly apprehensive of the meal, but relaxed more as Allissia allowed him a pre-taste, which he found, to his surprise, to be very tasty. Naturally enough they joined Audwyn in raising a mug of calcare, draining the sweet liquid and pressing hands to sternum as the burning went on and on, all the way from throat to fingertips. “Excellent brew,” said Leuwentok, and removed his mask for a moment to smell the drink. They ate, then, and the meal that had taken scarce minutes to prepare, took scarce seconds to vanish from their plates.
When they had eaten their fill, and Audwyn and Allissia had taken a small meal for themselves, Faulcon suggested a stroll up to the high field to watch the harvest. Leuwentok had come over slightly queasy and decided to lie down for a few minutes. Faulcon and the others walked easily through the woods, listening to the scurrying movements, of dusk creatures venturing into the deep, reddening shadows. From afar, from the mountain lands beyond this plateau, came the solitary, mournful howl of a female gulgaroth; the sound made Faulcon shiver. This was the time when the females came down from their mountain haunts, seeking the olgoi. It was not unknown for them to wander as far as the farms of the manchanged.
